Assignment:
Motivation and Rewards Analysis Paper
Purpose: This assignment will give students insight about what motivates employees to work, and why motivation differs based on job and personal factors. Applying motivation models can guide manager's interventions to improve employee motivation. This knowledge will increase students awareness of employee attitudes and behaviors associated with motivation, and frameworks for more motivating work arrangements. Such insights can be helpful for understanding job performance - one's own, co-workers, and subordinates. It is especially beneficial for managers to recognize and understand the dynamics of motivation.
Skills
- Understanding how motivation shapes employee performance
- Applying basic motivation models to real-world examples which may not exactly match textbook cases
- Analyzing and comparing three cases to identify key similarities and differences
- Interviewing
- Writing
Knowledge
This assignment will also help you become familiar with important management knowledge, such as:
- Recognizing employee attitudes
- Designing and implementing interventions to improve motivation
- Understanding the performance feedback process and how performance feedback influences employees
1. Interview three employees working in a single organization. This can be your workplace or another to which you have access.
2. Apply ideas and concepts from job attitudes and satisfaction, personality, and motivation to explain the different attitudes and levels of motivation you saw. Compare the employees' responses and offer rationale for differences among your three employees that links to their personal (age, sex) and contextual (job title, industry) situations.
3. Ask about the organization's performance evaluation system, and evaluate its effectiveness based on the information you've learned from your interviews. Consider the alignment between the organization's reward system and its goals.
4. What recommendations would you make to improve the motivation of the employees you interviewed, and/or to improve the performance management system?
5. Analyze and evaluate your findings in a paper, not to exceed 12 double-spaced pages, in Times New Roman with 1-inch margins. The formatting requirements for this paper are flexible; use your judgement to make a professionally formatted paper. There is no minimum page limit, as long as you address the assignment.
6. Do not include your ‘field notes', i.e., the notes or transcripts of your interviews.
7. To protect confidentiality, please do not identify the company or use real names. You may disguise names or refer to people by role or title.
Suggestions
- Select individuals who vary in interesting ways that may be relevant for understanding the factors that motivate people - for example, people at different organizational levels, career stages, job roles, sex, marital and parental status. Good variation in your sample makes it easier to identify differences among participants, and also highlights the contours of the performance management system (e.g., maybe it works well for senior level employees who get bonuses, but not for lower level employees who don't).
- Review the OB concepts before you have your interviews so you can prepare questions that focus on specific aspects of the theories. Have a list of prepared questions that you can use, and be flexible so that you can pursue interesting responses.
- Ask each participant about the performance evaluation process since their answers may vary.
- Use your judgement to present the most interesting and salient comparisons among your participants.